“Tom Quad, Christ Church 2004-01-21” by Toby Ord – Own work (Photo by uploader). Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
Many secondary school students in Hong Kong are feeling anxious now that the DSE results are back. The reason? Pass rates for the Chinese exam have continued to drop. This year only slightly more than half of the students to sit the exam earned a level 3 grade, which is the minimum accepted grade for admission into local universities.
What these grades mean is that is in spite of the students’ passing grades in other areas (the amount of students who passed the English exam rose from 48.8 per cent last year to 52.8 per cent this year), they won’t be able to enter universities in Hong Kong. Leaving aside the question of whether the DSE’s Chinese standards are fair, what options are available for students who didn’t make the grade?
Believe it or not, some education professionals advise students in this predicament to look overseas. It’s not as surprising as you might think. Universities outside of Hong Kong, especially in the UK, often accept DSE results for admission. And these schools put less emphasis on the Chinese part of the DSE. Students with a good English grade can look here.
One attractive option for Hong Kong students looking to study abroad is a foundation programme. These one-year programmes, found in several countries, are designed to prepare secondary school students for entry into universities. There are quite a few points to recommend this idea: first, the foundation programmes are not limited to a single degree track. There are courses dedicated to art, business, engineering, and other popular fields. Along with this, successfully passing a foundation programme makes it easier to apply for university. In fact, completing the UK’s University Foundation Programme guarantees you a place in many UK universities. And, perhaps most inviting, foundation programmes typically welcome overseas students and accept local academic certificates. For instance, Australia’s Foundation Studies course is specifically designed for international students.
There are downsides of a foundation programme, though. Most prominently, taking this route will delay your admission into university by a year. You also have to consider the cost. Obviously, studying in a foreign country will carry a higher price tag, in terms of tuition and other factors like travel and homesickness. There’s also the fact that not every school or field is open through a foundation programme. In the case of UFP, neither Oxford nor Cambridge accepts these students so far; for these schools you’ll have to go the traditional A-level route.
But, taken on the whole, the foundation programmes are definitely worth investigating. If you decide to take this route, consider a course at NTK to improve your chances both of entering the programme and of graduating and continuing on to university. Good luck!
